The Internet has emerged as a critical communication infrastructure, carrying traffic for a wide range of important applications. Internet services such as VoIP and SoIP services are becoming ubiquitous and more and more businesses and consumers are relying on the Internet for meeting their communications needs. For example, enterprises combine their voice and data services on an Internet based infrastructure. A customer moving services from a traditional telephone network based on Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) infrastructure to the Internet protocol based infrastructure needs to determine the amount of bandwidth required on the new infrastructure. One way to determine the total bandwidth required for the various services is simply using the data rate of coders and decoders for each of the services and adding the capacity used for each of the services. However, the IP infrastructure enables the customer to share the bandwidth among the various services and to reduce the size and cost of capacity and interface devices. Thus, the actual bandwidth consumption on the IP infrastructure for the combined traffic depends on various factors such as the protocol overhead, compression ratio, traffic mix, etc. Therefore, it is difficult to provide the actual bandwidth to a customer without performing extensive analysis and associated calculations.
Therefore, there is a need for a method that enables the service provider to provide to the customer the bandwidth of the combined traffic in the IP network.